Lotus' third annual Lotusphere '96 conference in Orlando, Florida, drew more than 9,000 Lotus customers, business partners, employees and journalists. Bankrolled by its sugar daddy, IBM, Lotus went all out on its opening ceremony.

All of the top officials were present: Lotus co-chiefs Michael Zisman and Jeffrew Papows, Ray Ozzie, generally credited with creating Notes; and Lou Gerstner, IBM's CEO.

Messers Zisman and Papows bounded on stage in casual shirts and sportcoats. They read from teleprompters and flashed 100-kilowatt smiles.

Mr Gerstner, by contrast, looked positively funereal in his dark suit. He evidently didn't mind playing the part of the straight man to Lotus' joshing officials.

A major point of the opening ceremony, in fact, was to reassure Lotus' 12,000 business partners that this company, reputedly named by founder Mitch Kapor for a Buddhist sutra, would retain its counter-cultural image. (Another clue was the huge, centre-stage, tie-dyed banner.) A video clip which poked fun at IBM showed a Lotus marketing executive gradually having his whole body swallowed up a seemingly ravenous big blue balloon. At the end, the balloon pops and he emerges in casual Lotus garb, yelling '100 per cent Lotus spirit!' Speaking of video clips, Andy Grove of Intel and Scott McNealey of Sun both offered congratulatory messages by tape. The latter Java-man exhorted Lotus in his regionally-indeterminate drawl to 'have fun and kick butt'.

Finally, after many other presentations which had the adoring crowd ready to chant 'Notes! Notes!' and do the Mexican Wave if Mr Zisman had led them, Lotus officially launched Notes.

First, the house music. And I mean House music: a black female singer shrieked 'Release the Power!' - the catchphrase associated with Notes - to a Eurodisco backbeat more at home in an Ibiza disco.

Then, the members of the Cirque modern dance troupe slithered on stage. In rainbow-hued leotards, some pranced and some leapt and some contorted their bodies into impossible, life-threatening angles.

Just as I was about to call an ambulance for one of the women whose frozen smile I feared would crack along with her spinal cord, creaked out on rollers was a 30-foot tall replica of the yellow Notes 4.0 package. Frankly, it looked like an overgrown cereal box.

Last year, it was rumoured that some disgruntled Lotusphere attendees who were turned away at the door called in a bomb threat. This year, the conference seemed to proceed without incident.

There were some gaffes: Mr Papows said that Notes 4.0 would be released in both 'Chinese and Taiwanese' when he clearly meant simplified and traditional Chinese characters. And Mr Gerstner referred to the Notes upgrades as 'Lotus 3.0 to Lotus 4.0.' That Freudian slip, however unintentional, shows how important Notes is to both Lotus and IBM. Sure, Mr Zisman claimed that their SmartSuite division, of which they hope to slice away one quarter of the market from Microsoft's Office suite this year, is 'one of the top 12 software companies in the world.' But Notes is to Lotus as Windows is to Microsoft, and Navigator to Netscape: the product that will spur sales in other products.

Notes' primacy may be why Lotus suddenly seems to be pushing Ray Ozzie more into the limelight. Mr Ozzie and three pals from the University of Illinois formed Iris Associates back in 1984 and started developing Notes then.

Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple Computer in his garage, blazed the trail for programmers as a cult figure. And Netscape gets all sorts of free publicity by trotting out 24-year-old wunderkind programmer and fellow Illinois alum, Marc Andreesen.

But Bill Gates remains lord of the nerds, and he and his company benefit from the resulting media attention.

Mr Ozzie isn't in the same mould. In buttoned-up dark shirt and sport coat, he is tan, has neat greying hair and smallish eyes. Richard Gere as an advertising executive.

But betraying his techno-geek roots, Mr Ozzie was slightly irritable and impatient with those who didn't quite grasp things his way as fast as he did.

Mr Ozzie was cocky, too. He said in the software field, Microsoft has only been beaten in a few areas. And workgroup computing by Notes has been one of them.

'It's like the big kid has his nose bloodied by the little kid,' Mr Ozzie said. 'And we've been bloodying it for a long time.' Mr Papows also got in his licks against Microsoft, referring to Exchange as 'chalkware'.

By the middle of the conference, Lotus officials no longer felt it necessary to justify Notes existence relative to the Internet. Instead, they leapt to the attack, practically claiming that Notes and its add-ons would eat up the rest of the competition.

In one heady moment, Mr Ozzie disparagingly referred to Java as a 'geeky language' and predicted that Web application developers would instead prefer Lotuscript, bundled with Notes.

It seems to me that Notes 4.0, with its added Internet and World-Wide Web capabilities and related software components, is technically at least as significant as Windows 95's improvements over Windows 3.1.

Others agree: a US consulting firm, the Meta Group, estimates that 13 million people will use Notes by 1997.

If that happens, previously straight-laced corporations may become infected with the Lotus sense of impishness.